That's a weird one -- it should be *creating* that library, so I'm not sure why it would complain that the library doesn't exist...? This could be a red herring, though -- perhaps some oddity in your tree and/or filesystem...? (I've seen this kind of thing before such that a "make distclean" fixed the issue, I think)

Sure enough, using a new build directory, I get the same error as above:

> I also get this last failure with gcc-4.5.1, but only with the debug flags:
>
> $ ../configure --enable-debug --enable-mem-debug --prefix=/home/jed/usr/ompi-1.5-gcc CC=gcc CXX=g++
> $ make
> [...]
> Making all in util
> CC libutil_la-installdirs.lo
> CCLD libutil.la
> ar: /home/jed/src/openmpi-1.5/bgcc/ompi/contrib/vt/vt/util/.libs/libutil.a: No such file or directory

Same error. Weird. Can you "make V=1" here, too?

This one completes with a clean build directory, reconfiguring from a non-debug build must have caused this issue the first time around.